Smart home based on Web3 technologies
In August, the Robonomics team received an invitation from the Cyber Academy to participate in the Polkadot weekend meetup in Tbilisi. On September 24, our engineer Pavel Tarasov gave a lecture about a decentralized smart home with data privacy, IPFS storage and a local server. Let’s take a look at the key points below.
What is IoT (Internet of Things)?
A short historical digression: Soviet mathematician and cybernetician, Victor Glushkov, in the 1970s had a hand in the creation of OGAS — a general civil automated system. It was supposed to collect data from manufacturers and entire industries and transfer it to the processing center to improve performance or for better planning. One can think of this in the context of the economic peculiarities at that time. But already then, people realized that they could use data from factories and entire industries to improve productivity. We can call OGAS some kind of IoT prototype. You can learn more about Robonomics’ vision for OGAS and Glushkov’s contribution to the future of the Internet of Things here.
Another example from history: Coca-Cola vending machines were connected to the “great-grandfather” of the Internet — ARPANET. They transmitted telemetry and the amount of resources remaining in the apparatus (bottles of soda).
There are a huge number of IoT devices and a large number of protocols for their interaction. Protocols are selected based on the environment, options for using devices: ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRa etc.
Why should you be so concerned about data privacy?
But what’s the problem if corporations find out when we turn off the lights? How will the dissemination of this data harm us? Contextual advertising offers us exactly what we need — is it really that bad?
iOS owners know the answer to this question for sure — each application asks them if they want to share data on other services. And if there is such a question, then there is a fairly large group of users who do not want to share their information. In addition, there is the problem of a single point of failure.
Decentralized smart home
But we can forego the use of the clouds and instead set up the local infrastructure at home ourselves. Three projects that I know about: Majordomo, OpenHAB, Home Assistant. We chose Home Assistant because it is an open source project. It is also easy to implement integrations. You still need sensors and a hub. But instead of a third-party cloud, you need to make a local server. You need to purchase SLS Gateway — it works via ZigBee with all smart home devices and with a single-board device, for example, Raspberry Pi. With such a system, all data does not leave the house.
But how to manage such a system remotely? You can set up a public IP address. But another option is to use decentralized services for global access: you can use the Robonomics network and other web3 networks. Apart from setting up public IP in case of a server failure all your data remains stored in the decentralized cloud.
About Web3 networks
Decentralized networks solve the single point of failure problem. All control over the data is in our hands, no corporations will sell our data to third parties. If any node goes down, the entire network will continue to work anyway. Robonomics has been building an open source infrastructure for connecting IoT devices over the past few years. Thanks to the slot in Kusama, the project has become more efficient, transactions are cheap and fast. There are also some useful features:
- Data log/data log/extrinsic, which allows you to write a line of up to 512 characters to the blockchain. Everything is stored in IPFS;
- Another extrinsic — the launch command for transferring data and any command, several commands in one;
- Digital twin — allows you to record several devices in one circuit. It is possible to save the structure of the whole house in the blockchain;
- In Robonomics, instead of a fee for each transaction, there is a subscription to the blockchain, which is provided by staked tokens. It is similar to working with cloud services — you also just buy access for a month.
How is data protected in the Robonomics network?
Natural telemetry requires the exchange of large arrays of information, so that this is possible, we use IPFS hashes. All this data is encrypted with a private key. It can only be deciphered using a seed phrase. There is also protection against transaction spam.
About smart city with IoT system
Let’s imagine smart co-working, which has the ability to manage participants: register, provide or cancel access, track activity. It is possible to upgrade not only a house, but also an office, co-living and the whole smart city, where houses automatically pay off their carbon footprint using green certification on the blockchain, or send readings to smart housing and communal services.
The article was written by Cyber Academy, the original text can be viewed here.
Text adaptation and translation was done by Mariia Vasileva.
You can watch the video of the report here and have a look at the presentation here.
Reach out Pavel Tarasov via this link.
